At the RISC-V Summit, Ventana Micro Systems Inc. announced their new family of high-performance processors starting with the Veyron V1. This processor is the first member of the family and has been designed to provide single-thread performance comparable to current high-end CPUs while providing time-to-market acceleration and reduced development costs for a range of applications.
At the RISC-V Summit, Ventana Micro Systems Inc. announced their new family of high-performance processors starting with the Veyron V1. This processor is the first member of the family and has been designed to provide single-thread performance comparable to current high-end CPUs while providing time-to-market acceleration and reduced development costs for a range of applications.
Veyron V1 Processor Overview
The Veyron V1 is based on an advanced 64-bit RISC-V core architecture and features a 2MB L2 cache, multi-threaded memory controller, and 6/8/12 core configurations with clock speed up to 3GHz. It also supports DDR4 memory and can be used in data center servers, embedded systems, 5G base stations, AI inference engines, automotive infotainment modules, client PCs, and more. Veyron aims to power next-generation servers and computing devices with improved performance and increased energy efficiency.
Veyron V1 Highlights
- Eight wide, aggressive out-of-order pipeline
- 3.6GHz
- 5nm process technology
- 16 cores per cluster
- High core count multi-cluster scalability (up to 192 cores)
- 48MB of shared L3 cache
- Advanced side channel attack mitigations
- Comprehensive RAS features
- System-level code profiling
- Provided with IOMMU and Advanced Interrupt Architecture (AIA) system IP
- SDK released with the necessary software already ported to Veyron
- Veyron V1 Development Platform available
Using the RISC-V architecture in this processor provides several benefits for data centers and other applications that need high-performance computing capabilities. For example, in data centers, it will enable increased computing density and improved energy efficiency compared to incumbent solutions. In addition, it will provide cost savings on development and manufacturing costs due to its ability to significantly reduce time to market compared to traditional architectures like x86 or ARMv8.
RISC processors are used today in various applications, from data centers to 5G networks to automotive technology. They offer peak processing power and are known for energy efficiency. The value prop is nearly identical to ARM processors, which deliver a lot of processing cores and power efficiency. We’ve seen ARM make great strides in both cloud (AWS Graviton) and data center use cases (Ampere).
The Veyron family of RISC-V processors from Ventana hopes to differentiate with the processor’s advanced 64-bit architecture, improved speed, and energy efficiency. Balaji Baktha, CEO of Ventana Micro Systems Inc., has stated that the company’s vision is to be “delivering the highest performance RISC-V CPUs to advance compute performance and efficiency is helping to reshape next generation high performance compute architectures. Today, we have a significant head start in providing a platform that can extend Moore’s Law.”
Veyron V1 will be offered in the form of high-performance chiplets and IP. Chiplet-based solutions provide better economics by right-sizing compute, I), and memory. Composable architectures leveraging chiplets let customers focus on innovation and differentiation to achieve workload optimization. Ventana also provides a Software Development Kit (SDK), which includes a complete set of software building blocks proven on Ventana’s RISC-V platform.
Market Impact
As businesses become more reliant on technologies such as cloud computing, next-generation applications, and artificial intelligence (AI), there is an increasing need for faster processors that offer greater energy efficiency at lower costs. Ventana’s new Veyron family of RISC-V processors could provide infrastructure vendors, be it cloud or on-prem, with precisely what they need. Ampere has seen many deployments both from traditional server vendors like HPE and adoption by multiple cloud providers. As such, there’s clearly a demand for CPU architectures other than mainstream x86.
Veyron V1 is set to be available in early 2023 and is the first in a series of products from Ventana.
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